The Fugitive (16 page)

“That's your daughter's decision,” I replied, and walked to the door.

The next day, I went to wait for her outside her school as usual. I felt sad, not so much because of what her father had said to me, but because learning about the tragic situation of her family had swept away the beauty and innocence of our relationship.

“Why didn't you ever tell me about your family? Why wait for your father to do it?”

“Are you mad at me?” she asked.

“No, but I feel as if I've been wounded by another tragedy, as if destiny had decided to force me to look at all the horror in the world. I'm not strong enough for that. Maybe your father is right, maybe I'm the least appropriate person to be close to you. Anyway, I don't even know whether or not you like me. Before I met your father and your silent brothers, our friendship was a breath of fresh air. Now, instead, I sense the looming presence of a story, a history that doesn't belong to me, and choices that I want no part of.”

“I liked you better when you told me fairy tales,” she said, with a sly air. “You want to know what my mother told me? She told me that the time has come for me to go to your house.”

She was much prettier than I expected. As she undressed, there emerged a twenty-four-year-old woman with raven hair and silken skin. The most beautiful woman I've ever seen. I plunged into her eyes, endlessly lost, until the day she told me: “My brothers are leaving soon.”

“What about you?”

“I'm staying.”

“I'm glad. You made the right decision.”

“My boyfriend is here now.”

“I thought I was your boyfriend,” I joked.

“He was in Germany, now he's moved to Paris.”

“Then we won't see each other again. I'll be the first to say it. It had to happen, I know that; I'm not sad about it. It's been a beautiful thing. The only thing I regret is that we didn't start making love the first day we met . . . ”

“Not me. I liked being courted by such a gallant Italian gentleman,” she said, laughing.

“You watch out for yourself.”

“You too.”

My gaze

is a crystal

focusing back over the years

 

 

My return from Mexico marked the beginning of the legal battle to win a new trial. That battle engaged the passions of a great portion of public opinion both in Italy and around the world. Committees of Solidarity were formed in various Italian cities; there was also an international Solidarity Committee with offices in Paris and London.

After a series of lengthy interlocutory motions and countermotions before the Appeals Court of Venice, on June 20, 1988, my panel of defense lawyers submitted a petition for a new trial to the Court of Cassation, the highest court of appeal.

In the meanwhile, in November 1987, I was released from prison
per differimento pena
, or deferment of sentence, a legal formula that refers to a temporary suspension of incarceration to give an inmate an opportunity to obtain medical treatment. I could not accept imprisonment or the verdict, and I sought escape in an unprecedented bout of bulimia. My metabolism altered so radically that I became especially at risk for strokes and heart attacks. The Supervisory Court decided to allow me my first eight months of conditional release. Those eight months were then extended repeatedly because my health never improved to an acceptable level.

In January 1989, the Court of Cassation ruled in favor of a new trial, overturning the lower court's judgment of conviction and sending the case to the Appeals Court of Venice for a new judgment.

On October 20th of the same year, four days (a gap that would prove fatal) before the new code of criminal procedure entered into effect, my new trial began. It ended on December 22, 1990. The court, after fourteen months of preliminary investigatory hearings, failed to hand down a judgment. Instead, it issued an interlocutory decree, sending the case to the Constitutional Court for instructions as to which criminal procedure it should apply. The court had come to a final judgment of acquittal for insufficient evidence, but it had run headlong into the following dilemma: if the old code of criminal procedure were applied, then the accused should be found guilty, but under the new code of criminal procedure, there should be a full acquittal.

My case was sent back to Rome, to be heard by the Constitutional Court which decided, on July 5, 1991, in an interpretative opinion, that the Venetian court had committed a serious judicial error by ignoring the transitory provisions, which required, in cases of this sort, that the accused be unconditionally acquitted.

The court record was bundled up and shipped back to Venice, where the Appeals Court was expected to reconvene and retire to chambers for five full minutes of deliberation; sufficient time to write a new opinion and pronounce its judgment of acquittal.

In the meantime, however (the wheels of justice don't exactly spin at dizzying speed), the Chief Judge of the court, which had carefully considered my case for fourteen whole months, had celebrated his birthday, reached legal retirement age, and was now enjoying his pension. On February 21, 1992, (the date set for the new hearing by the Appeals Court) I found myself facing a new Chief Judge and a completely different panel of judges. That panel, exercising its right to autonomous judgment, chose to skip the preliminary judicial investigation (which was replaced by a summary reading of the proceedings), and in the course of just a few hearings, on March 27, issued a new opinion that reconfirmed the guilty verdict and eighteen-year sentence first handed down in 1979. A firing squad.

The following day, just twenty-four hours after the judgment, with truly unusual rapidity, the State Attorney's office issued an arrest warrant, and once again I wound up in prison. All of this took place in an atmosphere of almost universal astonishment and dismay, because in the history of Italian justice, it had never before happened that a convict, with a penalty deferred for reasons of health by the only institute with jurisdiction to do so, that is, the Supervisory Court, should be incarcerated without a specific order to that effect issued by that Supervisory Court.

Back in prison, I sank into a hopeless state of abulia and bulimia. In other, simpler words, I was stuffing myself like a Christmas goose while displaying an unsettling indifference to everything around me. My health worsened rapidly, and after forty-seven days of hearings and medical examinations, the consulting psychiatrist named by the Supervisory Court issued this finding: “Unless you would like to read his obituary in the newspaper in the next few days, you need to release him.” At that point, I was given one year's provisional liberty. This was also partly the result of the indignant reaction of public opinion. There was a groundswell of support, prompted by my re-conviction and arrest, for the new campaign undertaken by the “Massimo Home Now” Committees.

My case records were shipped back to Rome, where they were set before the Court of Cassation; but the judgment was practically a foregone conclusion. In fact, on November 24, 1992, a hasty hearing put an end once and for all to the Carlotto Case.

The court ordered me to return to prison on May 13, 1993, where I could plan on remaining, paying my debt to society until the year 2004.

In that final phase of my legal soap opera, between the end of March 1992 and April 7, 1993, the day I was given a presidential pardon, the idea of life on the run once again became a distinct possibility. Not a single journalist I talked to failed to ask if I was planning to escape, once again, as the last way out of prison and an unjust conviction.

In all honesty, I replied that the idea had not even passed through my head, but I had to admit that the question was not unreasonable. The legal outcome had been turned on its head. An acquittal that had been announced and recommended by the Constitutional Court had been replaced, with all the speed of a magic act, by a conviction. After seventeen years, eleven trials, and a legal battle fought down to the last writ, I found myself looking at twelve years in prison, an extremely fragile mental and physical condition, and—worst of all—an infamous accusation, and conviction, that I had never, after all this time, been able to accept.

Anyone could do the math. The sentence was eighteen years; I had already served six, which left twelve. Add the twelve years to the seventeen that the entire matter had already taken from me, and you had a total of almost thirty years of my life locked up in this case. An absurd number, which led many people to urge me to flee; not my friends from the committees of solidarity, of course, but people I ran into on the street, in cafés, at newsstands. They would walk up to me, shake my hand, and after a few conventional phrases, lean forward and whisper: “Run away, you're sick, you'll only die in prison, you've already suffered enough . . . ”

I couldn't help but feel grateful for their solidarity, but I responded to everyone that I would never do it. It was a decision that I had already made the day after the judgment of the Appeals Court, and I had explained it at great length to a reporter from the
Corriere della Sera
in an interview I granted just a few hours prior to my arrest.

So here we were, talking about life on the run again, but this was an idea that I rejected for a number of reasons. First of all, to run would have been a betrayal of the trust of all those citizens who believed in my legal battle. Second, it would have been a betrayal of the trust of the Supervisory Court, which had ordered my release from prison to safeguard my health, not to facilitate my escape from the law. Among other considerations, I couldn't ignore the fact that if I ran, the result would be the rejection of similar requests from other sick inmates, because, in Italy, an individual's penal responsibility, once inserted in a prison context, is no longer limited to the individual, but extends to the entire prison population. Last of all, I didn't want to give any comfort to the small but powerful faction of those who believed I was guilty, and I knew they would have a field day if I escaped, pointing to the fact as proof of my guilt.

In other words, running away would be meaningless. If, in the past, escape had served to delegitimate the judgment of conviction, that judgment—after seventeen years and eleven trials—had emptied itself of meaning. If the idea of avoiding the penalty was meaningless, there was even less meaning in the idea of returning voluntarily to prison, because it would have been tantamount to an unconditional surrender, not only to the final judgment, but in the ultimate analysis to everything that had happened in all those years.

I found myself in a complex situation. On the one hand, I did not want to run, and on the other, I didn't want to go back to prison. There was still the chance of a pardon, but at the time it looked like an extremely remote possibility. I had always stated publicly that I would never ask for a pardon because I was innocent and, under the Italian system, one of the conditions of granting a pardon is an admission of guilt and a corresponding repentance. Since there was no precedent of a pardon given without an admission of guilt, it struck me as impossible to obtain.

Neither escape nor prison; that was my basic policy. What, then, was to be done? While I was sifting my thoughts in search of a solution, my family, my team of defense lawyers, and the Solidarity Committees decided to request a pardon on my behalf. My parents submitted a formal appeal, through the defense lawyers, to the Appeals Court with jurisdiction over the matter, and the matter began to wend its way through the bureaucratic labyrinth. The Solidarity Committees, on the other hand, held a press conference, in order to give the consulting jurists an opportunity to present the campaign in support of the initiative, which called for the circulation of a petition to be presented to the President of the Republic when a sufficient number of signatures had been gathered.

At first, I found myself all alone, for the first time, in opposition to all those who loved me or were supporting my cause. I was by no means opposed to the idea of a pardon (in fact, I viewed it as the only instrument available to rectify and render equitable the harsh rigors of the law, the only tool capable of closing the case with justice and humanity), but my complete certainty that the appeal would be rejected led me to believe that my family, lawyers, and Solidarity Committees were launching into a hopeless venture.

My counterproposal was this: let's focus all our energy on the lawsuit I had already brought against the Italian state for its repeated violations, to my personal harm and detriment, of the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, which fell under the jurisdiction of the Strasbourg Court of Human Rights. The general response was that, while that lawsuit was certainly important, their main interest was to keep me from being sent back to prison, which would be an act of injustice that would undoubtedly lead to my death, considering the steady deterioration of my own state of health.

We slowly came to a laborious compromise: I would collaborate and take part in every initiative in favor of a pardon, and I would support the principle of justice intrinsic to the issue of a pardon, but I would also insist on making it clear that I, as the defendant, had never asked for a pardon myself, because I was innocent.

And so an extraordinary groundswell of support swept across Europe, a grassroots campaign in favor of my pardon. Eminent jurists, leading figures in the worlds of culture and the arts, politicians and ordinary citizens mobilized to put an end to the longest running case in the history of Italian justice. They did everything possible—and impossible.

I have memories of that time that are at once terrible and magnificent; terrible because of the state of anxiety and tension that grew in me, day by day, as the final deadline of May 13th drew closer; magnificent because of the intense human warmth of that groundswell of support. I traveled throughout Italy, taking part in a dizzying array of events, initiatives, press conferences, panel discussions, and performances; and everywhere I went I was swept up in an overwhelming wave of warmth and affection from so many people.